A conversation with a member of Gran Fury, the "propaganda wing" of the early AIDS-awareness movement

Gran Fury

In a 1987 speech, the public health advocate Larry Kramer urged that HIV-related illness be seen as a new kind of contagion. ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition
to Unleash Power) was formed immediately afterward to bring needed awareness to a disease that was ravaging gay men. AIDS soon became politicized and
ACT UP used civil disobedience and activism to attack the inertia and downright hostility from the mainstream to homosexuals accused of bringing on
their own plague.

ACT UP held weekly "highly charged" meetings at The Center on West 13th Street in New York. It was a time of despair, and the ad-hoc members of ACT UP
used every public means to increase understanding and compassion towards the disease's sufferers and ire towards the disease itself. Out of these
meetings in 1988 came the graphic design and advertising arm, Gran Fury, a diverse group of designers and artists producing various public expressions
using t-shirts, posters, stickers, banners, billboards, and video to get the message through. Pairing the slogan "Silence = Death" and the purple
triangle (referencing gays in Nazi concentration camps) created in 1987 by the Silence = Death project, Gran Fury's iconic "Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed
and Indifference Do" poster put AIDS awareness on the map.

On January 31 through March 17 NYU's Steinhardt Department of Art and Arts Professions is hosting Gran Fury: Read My Lips, a retrospective
exhibition curated by Gran Fury and Michael Cohen. I spoke to one of the members, Loring McAlpin, who was speaking on behalf of Gran Fury about its collective legacy

Story continues below

Please use a JavaScript-enabled device to view this slideshow

It seems like only yesterday that AIDS hit like a nuclear blast and Gran Fury's advertisements were blasted all over too. What, in fact, triggered
the formation of the group?

The response was triggered by an awareness that our lives were in danger, that the political and medical institutions that we assumed would take the
necessary steps to stem a nascent epidemic were in fact stalled. Friends and lovers, people we knew, were dying, and even the medical facts of HIV were
not adequately understood. It's worth noting that for many of the early organizers of ACT UP, not having full attention of the health and political
establishment was something new - an awareness that the gains of gay liberation were limited. The irony is, of course, that nothing did more to bring
the lesbian and gay community into the mainstream than the AIDS crisis. But that may be precisely because it demonstrated so clearly that stigma and
discrimination served no one's interests, and that gays and lesbians were much more a part of society than had been acknowledged.

On a more literal level, Gran Fury formed after Bill Olander of the New Museum offered their window on Broadway to ACT UP in November 1987 for an
installation. An ad hoc group formed to use this opportunity to get a message out. The group that created the installation, called "Let the Record
Show" continued meeting to do more public projects, and this group became Gran Fury.

Gran Fury was the model of NYC police cars in the '80s. Where did you get the name?

We thought the name of the NYC squad car described nicely our anger and urgency, with humor, a slightly camp sensibility, and a nod to the ordinary—a mid-range Plymouth.

Gran Fury's method of using conventional advertising approaches was echoed by Guerilla Girls, Barbara Kruger, and others. How was the decision made
to go in that direction?

We simply used the tools that were available to us, and of course the languages of advertising and appropriation were two of the first places we
looked, even as we sought to insert unexpected messages in those vocabularies. There was not really a self-conscious "conceptual strategy". The press,
government and the medical establishment were not delivering information or countering stigma; we wanted our activist voice to fill that void.
Therefore, we tried to insert our message seamlessly into those spaces that were normally occupied by authority, and we used whatever we could to grab
attention. It didn't matter to us if that was a borrowed strategy or not.

Yours was a collective. How were creative decisions made?

Decisions were made collectively, in weekly meetings. Then production tasks were divided according to the skills and availability of individual
members. It wasn't always the most efficient process, but we managed to do a relatively effective boiling down of a message in this way.

You were the "propaganda" arm of ACT-UP and arguably the images you produced, some of which are iconic today, did as much for raising awareness as
anything. What were your strategies and principles? Did you have a plan of attack?

At first, when we had limited funds, either our own money or from ACT UP, we sniped small flyers on the streets of lower Manhattan for the cost of
offset printing and wheat paste. As the art world looked for ways to support ACT UP and the activist response to the pandemic, we were offered grants
and opportunities. Simply, we sought to bring awareness about the pandemic that would lead others to join us in asking for the appropriate steps to be
taken, whether that was streamlining the drug approval process, making funds available to allow for treatment and social services for HIV+ individuals,
or countering social stigma that prevented those affected from getting appropriate care. Additionally, we recognized that our "propaganda" had a role
in the group identity. Having graphics that made our demands not only visible but also to some extent pleasing gave ACT UP a stronger sense of itself.
We chose not to sequester ourselves within the art world, removed from a broader public. Therefore we always demanded that our work to be visible in
public space, and made that a condition for sponsors. We also decided not to make anything that could be sold, no unique objects that could be
marketed, or to participate in the gallery economy. In retrospect, perhaps we could generate funds for bigger projects, but in not having to focus on
that aspect, it forced us to concentrate on a message. None of us pursued this work as a full time career, and so there was a need to keep it simple.

What were the roadblocks in getting the ACT UP message out?

The Kissing Doesn't Kill campaign, one of our most widely seen projects, was an example of the extent to which even art world support had limits. The
tagline to our image of racially mixed straight and gay couples kissing was "Government Inaction, Corporate Greed and Public Indifference Make AIDS a
Political Crisis". The project, Art on the Road, had a funder, AMFAR, that the organizers didn't want to offend. So it ran without the tagline outside
of New York City. Our hands were tied in this instance; we did not have the power to insist that the full message be run. We decided that the image
itself had some value alone, and agreed to participate in spite of this. That alone proved provocative enough to generate press, which extended the
reach of the project.

In general, we tried to remain aware of what was permitted in public space. If our message was too radical, we risked both access as well as a broader
public reception.

In the catalog to current Gran Fury exhibition photographs of the famous "Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do" with the inter-racial
and male to male kissing scratched out (although female to female was not touched), what did this tell you about American tolerance?

Although it would be tempting to conclude that it reveals a greater acceptance of lesbians than gay men, as that defacement occurred in San Francisco,
it may simply demonstrate a strain of lesbian separatism more than anything else. The heterosexual interracial couple in the image was erased as well.

So much of Gran Fury's work, which appeared radical then, has been co-opted or adopted by mainstream image-makers. Does this make you proud or not?

At the very least, it suggests that our imagery became part of a vocabulary, so yes, that's nice to know.

How would you describe Gran Fury's legacy?

Perhaps we take our greatest satisfaction in the achievements of the broader movement - the ways in which the drug approval process was accelerated,
the inclusion of patient groups in that process, the reduction of pricing for life saving drugs, the broader movement to make health care more
affordable and increase access for all Americans. If we had a role in advancing the ways in which political and social dissent harnessed the power of
media to communicate a more radical politics, then that also. But perhaps in that sense we were the product of many other broader forces that propelled
these things. In many ways, we were just at the right place at the right time to have been allowed to operate as we did.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.